I'm the Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media. It's been a long journey: The New York Times, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, a little tabloid TV, AOL -- and I certainly don't want to forget TMZ. I lived through a newspaper strike (sounds quaint, right?), the New York City Black Out in '77, and my bout with the Cabbage Patch Dolls. I was the founder and CEO of True/Slant, which FORBES invested in and acquired four years ago. I got hooked on the News business as the student editor of The Daily Iowan during the days of Vietnam, Watergate and Roe v. Wade. I can quote all the best lines from "All the President's Men," and I still think Howard Beale did it better than all the real-life pretenders who followed him. I owe so much to James Bellows -- a truly gifted editor, an extraordinary human being and a mentor who was always there for me.

Inside Forbes: The 9 Realities of Building a Sustainable Model for Journalism

The evolution of the newsroom continues. (Credit: Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart... Tales from the Last Glory Days of Cleveland Newspapers, by John H. Tidyman)

I set out as an entrepreneur four years ago to change the world of journalism and build a digital business. I had a few decades in the news industry, one of them in new media, to guide me. During my journey, I’ve kept two quotes locked in my mind. This one, from Don Logan, the former CEO of Time Inc., in response to how much he spent building the ill-fated Pathfinder Web site: “It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.” The other was from Jeff Zucker, NBC Universal’s former CEO. In talking about digital video, he said: “Our challenge with all these ventures is to effectively monetize them so that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Both were so right. I worked at AOL for eight years (Logan actually took charge for a brief, not-so-shining moment). I witnessed how strategic indecision can flush money down the digital drain. Zucker was fretting about pennies in 2008. Today, it’s more like fractions of them. Every three months, 1.1 trillion banners (or display ads) are served across the Internet. That’s 150,000 every second. Publishers sell many at CPMs (the cost per thousand impressions) ranging from $10 to $20 — $40 for certain video, if they’re lucky. Ad networks sell the inventory they aggregate from publishers for $3 to $5. And the rise of programmatic audience buying (think Wall Street-like trading desks) has pushed bids for a single impression to as low as 1/100th of a cent. All that is a far cry from the price of a Super Bowl ad or a page in a newspaper or magazine.

Bottom line: technology has disrupted an economic formula that worked for the media industry for a century. What it means for journalism is simple, yet difficult for traditionalists to hear. You cannot run a news business and produce quality content in the digital era with a cost structure built for analog times. That is, if you want to make money, which is what business is about. Today, some newsrooms are supported by high-priced subscriptions for specialized professional services (viewed by some as subsidized news). Others are resorting to non-profit status. There have even been calls for government intervention to help the industry. Always entrepreneurial, FORBES launched a Web site in 1996 while other media companies watched and waited. First to market, it built a powerful digital business. Now, we’re leading the way again, developing a new, sustainable model for advertising-supported journalism in the era of social media.

We can do so because of the strength of our 95-year-old brand, now in startup mode all over again. Our message has never been more in sync with the times. Free enterprise and entrepreneurial capitalism are driving today’s youth. Smart investing is required to navigate economic uncertainty. Forbes.com draws purpose from our brand mission, FORBES magazine draws new inspiration from our participatory digital strategy.

The numbers are certainly encouraging. The average price per copy of a FORBES magazine subscription is higher than any of our competitors. Our total readership is 5.1 million, according MRI. That’s one million more than the nearest competitor. Print revenues increased 9% last year. Newstand sales, long-viewed as a measure of magazine vitality, rose in the second half of 2011, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (competitors in our category suffered significant declines). And with our new digital strategy, the Forbes.com audience has doubled in the last year, to 30 million monthly unique users, according to our internal Omniture numbers (in February, comScore put our annual growth at 40%, with a smaller total audience). The sharing of Forbes.com content, perhaps a new kind of newsstand measuring stick, has soared along with traffic from social sites. Last year, our content was the seventh-most shared across LinkedIn, ahead of all our competitors.

Still, FORBES and the entire media industry face daunting challenges. Digital publishing is perhaps the most disruptive force the media has ever encountered. Anyone can publish anywhere, anytime and attract an audience. Questions loom about the future of print in a tablet world. As downward pressure on CPMs indicate, new kinds of digital ad products are required. Journalists must learn entirely new skills or risk being run over by a competitive force of native digital content creators. News organizations need to develop new labor models (our contributor network is one) that can produce quality content efficiently. Most scary of all, news stalwarts must recognize that brands are publishers, too, and they want the media to provide new solutions for them to reach their customers.

So, what are the requirements for a sustainable model for journalism? Here are my nine:

1. Quality: In the bruising online world, timeliness, accuracy, constant updating, knowledge, relevance and conciseness must be combined with extreme openness. There’s a certain amount of untidiness and confusion to the digital experience, and that’s okay. In the lean-back print universe, craftsmanship, finesse and perfection must prevail. The discipline of print-reporting cycles can be combined with digital audience data to produce highly effective long-form content across all platforms.

2. Authenticity: For the last 50 years, journalistic command-and-control resulted in homogenized products. Today’s sophisticated niche audiences require the expertise and passion of individual voices.

4. Accountability: Journalists must “transact,” or engage one-on-one, with audience members to win their loyalty and trust.

5. Usability: News experiences must open connections with no dead ends — and offer the thrill of continuous discovery. Platforms, more than Web sites, enable the flow of information, discussion and community.

6. Efficiency: Newsrooms must remove the friction from publishing by eliminating traditional bureaucratic layers. They need to hand over more decision-making authority to a new breed of entrepreneurial journalist.

7. Scalablity: A platform and network mentality can produce all the benefits of Metcalfe’s Law for journalism.

8. Transparency: The Gutenberg Press made it impossible for religious leaders to retain control of the flow of information. Digital publishing put an end to the journalist’s reign as the gatekeeper for news, information and opinion. First, the audience took its rightful place in the conversation. Now, companies are stepping in with their own newsroom-like content operations. Clay Shirky, a professor and internet observer at New York University, says publishing has been reduced to a “button.” That’s functionally true. Still, it’s critically important to know who’s pressing it. The environment matters, too. News organizations can leverage the publish button by inviting in all participants — identifying, delineating and clearly labeling each voice.

9. Profitability: The media business is about relationships. It’s also about helping brand marketers forge connections, primarily with customers and thought leaders, in credible environments. For decades, display advertising, classified ads and the 30-second commercial did the job. Then along came Google, Craigslist and Youtube to disrupt what was a pretty good thing. The downward pressure on CPMs is sure to continue in a world of Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. In news, transparency is key to implementing viral ad solutions. Just like journalists, brands are respected voices in their industries. Just like editors and reporters, they are capable of carrying on a conversation with consumers. By embracing the notion of transparency — with clear identification and labeling — news organizations can provide a place for journalists and marketers to exist side-by-side rather in silos. FORBES AdVoice is an example. Eight brand marketers, all clearly labeled as such, have used the same tools as our staffers and contributors to publish content on Forbes.com and share it across the social Web. Their work is also dynamically and contextually integrated throughout our site — on the home page, in the most popular module, search results and elsewhere. The FORBES AdVoice Platform is developing curation tools and will soon integrate marketing partners with the FORBES Follow Bar, a new social feature soon to be launched. We’re also deploying new IAB advertising units that “pull in” text, white papers, video and tweets that a marketer has created across the Web. These are the type of premium products that enhance, rather than disrupt, emerging consumer experiences. Last week, The New York Times gave SAP, the German software company and our first AdVoice partner more than a year ago, an intriguing measure of social control. When SAP shares a NYT story in its Twitter stream, it will carry SAP banner ads. “Increasingly, advertising that feels native to the medium is going to win,” says Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed.

My commitment to journalism goes back to when I banged out stories on a CRT as a student editor at the University of Iowa. At that time, news was talked about as a public trust. Clinging to that belief, great journalists produced great work that served the public so well for so long. It was nevertheless an elitist argument that led to impenetrable walls of arrogance. After that, ironically, came declining public trust. Now, in the the face of social media, cell phone cameras and whatever comes next, the news industry risks irrelevance. I’m now a product guy, which means I care about what all this means for journalism and the business.

There is no shortage of demand for news, information, context, perspective and analysis. In fact, it’s greater than ever. That means the future of journalism is quite bright if its practitioners can truly embrace what the disruptive forces of technology and the inevitability of transparency have to offer. If they do, it will be great for their colleagues, the audience, marketers — and especially the business of journalism.

Note: If you’d like to read more, check out my ebook on the future of digital journalism. $4.95 on Hyperink and Amazon.

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fine rules for online media. author errs, however, by assuming and promoting the disinformation that journalism is akin to modern media, digital or otherwise, in any but the slimmest or most self-serving way. author correctly cites the public’s need and desire for news, however, the leap to suggesting that need and desire are being met in any journalistically responsible matter is sheer, self-serving fantasy. journalism, factual matter regarding who, what, where, when and how as evidenced by two or more independent sources, is all but dead in modern media. getting rumor, opinion or disinformation diseminated as quickly as possible, well, That’s your ‘intersection of digital [media] and social media’.

I respectfully disagree. One of our goals — if not the No. 1 goal — is to combine the values and standards of our traditional media heritage with the dynamics of digital publishing. I do believe many news organizations are working to do that. Some newer digital news brands lack the history to fully appreciate what that means. There can never be perfection. But we’re all working to figure out a new world that I believe will be prove more beneficial to news consumers than the one left behind — and that in so many respects helped show the way.

thank you for not using any form of the word ‘journalism’ in your response. the so-called ‘dynamics’ of digital publishing to which you refer appear in overwhelming circumstance to preclude factual, unbiased jounalism produced in order to provide for an informed electorate. Tittilation, tabloidism, self-serving opinion, hyperbole, train-wreck voyerism, reptile brain emotional appeals, tribalism-these are the overwhelming products resulting from the primary dynamic at work in digital publishing and modern media in general. The rush to produce, the rush to i.d. and capture the fleeting glance of a potential customer and secure their loyalty among a growing audience for commercial gain. This is the essential difference between modern media, including digital publishing, and journalism. when you confuse pandering for news, the new world of news is not only not more beneficial, it is damaging by it’s failure to provide for an informed electorate. As an aside, the suggestion that anyone might be expecting perfection is desperately pitiful.

I agree and disagree with your statements. I agree that there are many sites, journalists, bloggers, etc, etc that do simply incite more hype, propaganda, and bandwagon rodeos… You say that in these types of written news articles, that they infer more opinion than fact of who, what, when, where and are typically unsupported by more than two sources….which your posted statement comprises of fully in both manners BTW. But I see just as many that do adhere to the standards of journalistic integrity than you impose. The question is, where are you getting your news from, and from how many sources? Is akin to gong to the doctor…do you stick with just his diagnosis, or do you seek second opinions as well?

To simply garner from one or two sources for reliable news and information, is setting yourself up for the inadequecies that you incurring in the journalism market. There are just too many ways that even factual information…can get lost in translation, or be misinterpreted and represented in this day and age…and has been so even before this modern age of reporting, and will continue thereafter. And this by even the most believed or perceived credible news organizations known. CNN adheres to being reliable…but is not perfect. FOX news attempts to adhere to it too, and falls short at times as well. Time, National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post…Hell, even Forbes adheres for the most part to these Traditional Journalistic Practices…even utilizing the nine mentioned here by DVorkin in Web Media formulations, but even they make mistakes. And again, can depend on who you are following…or whom it is authored by, as many of these news articles, especially of the web sort…are written more in Editorial format. Why combine it into that? To do exactly what the author, DVorkin suggests…to reach, relate, and interact with an audience. Facts are facts…but they do little to provide interactivity, which is what MOST of the web and it’s users are all about now.

thank you for asking. I get rss feeds from upi, ap, reuters, usat, nyt, wsj,politico, forbes, fox, cnn, npr, al jazeera english, bloomberg, bbc, financial times, buzz feed, daily reckoning and mother jones to name a few and I think I appreciate what I think you are suggesting. people commenting at the fox website spend about the same amount of energy preaching to their own choir as commenters at mother jones or media matters preach to theirs. I believe in the ‘matrix’ phenomenon being widely discussed recently where ‘news’ seekers tend to gravitate toward that media produce which tends to reflect and support their established beliefs. Particularly in light of the number of churnalism outlets available to serve them. That is one of my disputes with mislabeling media, churnalism, pandering, produce and the rest as any form of journalism or news. media is purposed to build a brand, to popularize. The rules DVorkin suggests in this article are perfectly satisfactory for media brand building (although, as Bob points out below, they are hardly insightful or revolutionary), but I resent the self-serving suggestion that media brand building is akin in any fashion to journalism, or news gathering. They are two different animals. And every time you allow them to co-opt the integrity of journalism as if it were theirs to claim, it makes it easier for them to help you to believe that they practice ‘Traditional Journalistic Practices’, or that they want to. The phenomenon which ‘news’ mislabeling has lead to most recently is that those people you seem to want to ‘reach, relate and interact with’ will not allow themselves to be reached, related to or interacted with when the ‘message’ does not coincide with their established beliefs. Whether that ‘message’ is the stone, objective absolute truth or not. The purpose of the journalism important enough to be protected by the First Amendment is to make certain that, not only is the verifiable truth available for those people to learn, but also that the rumor, disinformation, propoganda and the like obscuring the truth from those people are equally exposed and rightfully discredited. The purpose of modern media is to gather another loyal customer by giving them whatever they are looking for because, Lord knows, if those people don’t find a reflection of their opinion from one source, they will certainly get it from another. Because the truth, more difficult, expensive and time consuming to produce, simply doesn’t fit into the media equation. Please, Jason. The next time your automatically grant the respect which should be reserved for journalists to the side show media barkers who have replaced journalists, try to imagine the odds of an item of God’s own life-saving truth surviving if it happened to run contrary to the well being of modern media.

Jason, thanks for the thoughtful response to Fritz. My job as the author and moderator of my community is to keep the conversation moving along. If you click the “expand comment” link just above you can see his response to your specific question. I didn’t Call It Out because it’s directed at you, quite lengthy and reiterates much of what he said before in a comment I did Call Out.

Part 1: puff piece on the glorious wonderland of success that apparently is Forbes.

Part 2: a series of run-of-the-mill recommendations (be more efficient, use scalable platforms, produce high quality content WHILE spending more time interacting with your readers, etc.). Note that most of these items involve the “do more with less” pixie dust mantra that executives who don’t have a specific answer like to use.

Part 3: a discussion of profitability that highlights letting advertisers provide content (…is that going to improve quality?).

Would like to instead read about how to apportion fixed resources. Forbes.com is deep in the red without the print gravy train to support its content engine… how and where would you cut and invest to achieve profitability as a standalone digital business? That’s the problem everyone is dealing with; rattling off a few management talking points doesn’t advance the conversation.

Doing that analysis takes a lot of time, and the resulting online article won’t generate the PVs and ad revenue necessary to cover the cost of producing it. The reason that article doesn’t get written is exactly the problem that needs solving. Until it gets solved, users are stuck with surface-level analysis like the above under the misleading headline that they should expect novel guidance on how to build something sustainable.

Thanks for your comment. FORBES is a profitable business, and as noted, our print revenues rose 9% last year (not many magazines can say that). Actually, we are not doing more with less, as you suggest. In changing our labor model, we’ve hired quite a few people over the past two years. In fact, the number of full-time employees in our newsroom remains pretty much the same as it was two years ago — we just have different people with different skills doing different things. We have a producer desk. We have an Audience Development team. Both had not existed in their current form 24 months ago. We’re also now building a real-time desk to enable our staff reporters and correspondents to provide more timely information and analysis for news enthusiasts. Also, hundreds of contributors participate in our incentive-payment plan… they are compensated for building audiences. As I’ve noted in prior posts, 25% of my budget for story content (that doesn’t include editors, producers, etc.) goes to pay contributors. So, I humbly suggest we’re actually doing more with more.

Very interesting. I gotta sit down and reread this stuff. We discuss this at Forbes alot — the idea of journalist as expert. It’s not always easy, but Im working on it. It’s definitely a challenge and I think — like certain disruptive technologies in the market — older reporters are just not going to pick up on this in droves. And Im afraid they are going to fall by the wayside. Institutional knowledge of what is journalism will erode, in my apocalyptic scenario. Me, Im on the cusp of midlife and feel that this is my last chance to “get it”. Onward…

Ken, I feel it’s our job not to let institutional knowledge about journalism erode. In fact, that’s where my Bob Feit rule comes into effect. Nearly 40 years ago, Bob Feit was the guy at AP-Dow Jones, the wire service I worked for right out of college, taught me how to write what you and I know as the WSJ 10-point items. He would sit down with me day after day and squeeze extraneous words out of two lines of text and make me add truly important words back to fill out the lines. That’s why I remain obsessed about packing in information — and why widows, even in digital content, drives me nuts. I’m not sure if Feit is alive today, I sure hope he is. But I act on what he taught me to this day. And I hope I can have that kind of impact on younger people who get into this business.